2018 Lokoya Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Mount Veeder

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Winemaker Notes

Blackberries, herbs, green pine needles, blackcurrants and lead pencil. Full-bodied with incredible structure and powerful tannins. It goes on for minutes. The structure is something else. Muscular, but the tannins give form and focus to the beautiful fruit. Mountain-grown Latour! Extraordinary. Try after 2026.

About Winery

Lokoya Winery (established in 1995) by Jackson Family Wines, specializes in premium small lot wines (100% varietal Cabernet Sauvignon) exclusively from Napa grown fruit from select mountain appellations. Founder, Jess Jackson wanted to create a wine that showcased some of the best mountain vineyards in Napa Valley. He began acquiring specific properties in the early to mid 1990s. The name Lokoya is a tribute to the Native American tribe that inhabited what is now known as Mt. Veeder in the Mayacamas mountains rising above the western side of Napa Valley.

While in the early years of its production, Lokoya was produced by several winemakers – it is really winemaker Chris Carpenter who has become such an integral component to producing these wines each year (he became Lokoya’s winemaker in 2000). Chris is from Chicago and is arguably one of Napa Valley’s most well-rounded individuals. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois while playing Big-Ten Football (followed by his MBA, also at the University of Illinois). While selling medical products he simultaneously worked at an Irish Bar in Chicago and he began to explore both music, food and wine in Chicago (from personal experience, a great food and wine town).

Eventually he moved to Napa Valley and earned a master’s degree from UC Davis in viticulture and enology. He joined the wine making team at Cardinale in 1998 as an enologist. Oh, and he never gave up his passion for bar-tending – he bar-tended at the Rutherford Grill for nearly 20 years before eventually retiring from this gig (it was one night a week on Fridays).

Today Chris oversees the wine making for Cardinale, Lokoya, La Jota and Mt. Brave wines. He knows the vineyards very well and keeps only the highest quality fruit for Lokoya. In certain cases, this comes down to merely a few select rows in specific blocks in the vineyard. All of the Lokoya wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered and fermentation is conducted with indigenous yeast already on the grapes.

After many years of looking for a ‘home’ for Lokoya, Jackson Family Wines located this special property (77 acres in total of which approximately 25 are planted to vines). They grow a select number of Bordeaux red varieties on site and perhaps somewhat surprising, several acres of Riesling.